an open mind : about canadian law & ethics

Tagged courts

Four months after Chief Justice Winkler’s retirement, the chair of the Chief Justice of Ontario remains unoccupied. Most chatter on the topic of his replacement has focused on names. Will it be so-and-so from the Court of Appeal? How about an appointment straight from the practising Bar? Will it be a woman or member of a visible minority this time? In every other walk of life, we don’t fill positions by hiring a star and hoping he or she will do well. Rather, we draw up a job description around the purposes of the organization, and recruit the candidate who can…

Some welcome editorial comments this week from Justice D. M. Brown, of the Superior Court of Ontario, in Western Larch Limited v. Di Poce Management Limited, 2012 ONSC 7014. Starting at para. 269 of the decision, the judge candidly describes the disproportionate time required to make rulings on complex summary judgment motions. In a nutshell, he takes aim at one area of judicial allocation, judgment writing time. He says the internal scheduling protocols should be updated to reflect the time needed to deal with summary judgments, which may take up little hearing time but deal with issues as complex as many…

January, 2012, in my tiny personal blogosphere, will see the launch of my first monthly column for a national legal e-zine. The piece, still in draft, is about procrastination, no less. Insha’Allah, I’ll meet my first deadline. (le sommaire en français suit) During the last days of 2011, it’s hard to put the law on pause. I’ve unplugged the telly from Cable, lost a motion in the Toronto Masters court, and thought out loud why the articling crisis is a made-in-Ontario problem. Writing a blog on mentorship naturally requires a modicum of navel-gazing. By definition, this requires an out-of-body experience.…